Ossian Smyth
The measure only exists where this member actually spoke in the debate their vote belongs to, and where that vote can be tied to a specific question. Both cuts are steep.
| Votes cast | 660 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 9 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 4 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 2 |
The third row is the sharpest cut. A committee-stage sitting can hold fifteen divisions while its speeches discuss forty-two numbered amendments, and the record does not say which amendment each division was. Those votes are counted here and deliberately left unscored rather than guessed.
The same scorable votes, split by whether the member went with their party. The top-right cell is the one worth reading: a stated position reversed while following the party line.
| Voted with own party | Voted against own party | |
|---|---|---|
| Matched their words | 0 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 5 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
Every case the pipeline flagged, with the contribution it read and the vote as recorded. Judge them yourself — that is the point of showing them rather than only the rate.
Read as support (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 46: In page 27, after line 34, to insert the following: “Commission to monitor providers’ compliance with high-risk vendor measures 33 . (1) The Commission shall take reasonable steps to monitor providers’ compliance with high-risk vendor measures. (2) For the purposes of subsection (1), the Commission may serve a direction on a provider which may require the provider to do one or more of the fol…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.75) · voted NIL · with their party
I am tempted to address all the points but I will stick to the amendment. To Deputy Danny Healy-Rae, climate action is all about electrification, including electrification of transport and heating. In urban areas there will be district heating, which is not electrification but there is a move towards electrification. Therefore, there needs to be an increased focus on price regulation and making sure people are not ma…
Valence runs −1 (negative) to +1 (positive). This is a separate measure from alignment above and says nothing about how anyone voted — "the Minister has been asleep at the wheel" is strongly negative and carries no position on the question.
| Model | Speeches scored | Mean valence | Corpus mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| vader | 1,223 | +0.561 | +0.423 |
Mean tone by topic, most negative first. Topics come from an LDA model fitted over debate contributions; the terms are the model's, the labels are hand-assigned.
| Topic | Speeches | Mean valence |
|---|---|---|
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 18 | +0.526 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 9 | +0.530 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 132 | +0.558 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 29 | +0.568 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 72 | +0.571 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 12 | +0.573 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 50 | +0.678 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 125 | +0.682 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 22 | +0.710 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 70 | +0.713 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 16 | +0.734 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 243 | +0.784 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 36 | +0.798 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 17 | +0.799 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 24 | +0.848 |
Contributions whose tone sits more than two standard deviations from this member's own average. Baselines are per member on purpose — an absolute threshold would just rank people by temperament.
Good morning to the young people and teachers. Just to let them know what is happening, Senator Catherine Ardagh is asking me, representing the Government, how we spend money to cure cancer. I am here on behalf of the Minister for Health to answer the question…
I would like to start with a question about queuing in emergency departments. The acute hospitals emptied during the pandemic. There was a determined effort to make space available in case of a surge, the discharge of patients into long-term residential care w…
It is not just a matter for the Garda. As our lives go online, criminals go online. We spend more of our time there so it is natural that more crime happens online. That is why the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau is a growing division of the Garda - as so ma…
I will raise with the Minister for Health the Senator's points about bringing in lung cancer screening and extending breast cancer screening to younger people. With regard to the Senator's point about multi-annual funding, I will ask about that in the Vote in …
I can confirm the NCSC is doing that in co-operation with An Garda Síochána because the gardaí are the people who see first-hand what the effect of these scams is. The scams are always changing because people are protecting themselves. It is an arms race. The …
Several months ago at the start of this epidemic I asked about sick pay for people who do not have it and the introduction of emergency measures to prevent the virus spreading. If people who traditionally do not have sick pay are forced to go to work, the viru…
Many Deputies are aware that there were problems in the past with obtaining evidence to get prosecutions because of challenges under privacy legislation. That is why we have to be so careful that we are ensured privacy-wise that we are compliant with GDPR law …
-----to catch those carrying out illegal dumping. In the case of commercial dumping, there are stronger powers for local authorities, in that they can use drones and bodycams. Many of those involved in this activity are dangerous criminals and it is difficult …
It takes all parties to solve this problem. This is not a partisan issue and it will not work if one party takes it one way. It does not work if parties condemn or denounce one another. It works if we can constructively work together. I am not long in politics…
I was in the north inner city with the Minister, Deputy Foley, when this attack happened. My reaction was surely the same as that of everybody, one of absolute horror at the idea of children being stabbed on the street. Shortly afterwards, there was a horrible…
I was in Cork city last year meeting Cork City Council and the waste collectors, the people who collect the waste themselves, so that I could get a good input, in particular on dumping. I was not aware that there was a problem with anti-dumping initiatives bei…
I was very happy to manage to secure additional funding in the budget for next year for anti-dumping initiatives, for exactly the reasons I was talking about in response to the previous question. Public information works for most people but not for that small …
Alignment by the party a member sat for on the day, with 95% Wilson intervals. This is the test the measure could have failed.
| Party | Aligned | 95% CI | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| PBP | 82.5% | 68–91% | 40 |
| LAB | 78.2% | 69–85% | 101 |
| IND | 76.5% | 72–81% | 327 |
| SF | 75.8% | 69–81% | 198 |
| SD | 71.4% | 58–82% | 49 |
| FG | 69.1% | 62–76% | 162 |
| FF | 67.9% | 60–75% | 165 |
| GP | 56.8% | 41–71% | 37 |
Members of government parties align their stated position with their vote 9.4 points less often than Independents — bootstrap 95% CI [+2.7, +16.0], which excludes zero. Opposition parties sit 9.5 points above government too, CI [+3.1, +15.9]. Independents and opposition members are indistinguishable from each other (−0.0 points, CI [−6.3, +6.2]). So the gap does not come from having no party; it comes from being in government, which is what a whip effect should look like. Read this as the measure behaving sensibly, not as a finding about any individual.
Two automated methods were built and both failed. What survives is the rule-based layer, which is why the coverage above is narrow.
| Method | Accuracy | 95% CI | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| nli-vs-mover-anchor:deberta | 35.9% | 29–42% | 234 |
| nli-vs-mover-anchor:distilroberta | 11.5% | 8–16% | 234 |
Zero-shot entailment was asked to judge contributions whose true position is known — the member moved the amendment, so the answer is support by construction — and got it right 11.5% of the time, returning "unclear" or "oppose" for nearly everything. A classifier trained on the rule-labelled cases over the corpus embeddings reached 71.1% against a 65.3% majority-class baseline: better than chance, not better enough. Both are excluded from every figure on this page. Only the rule-based cascade, which is exact where it fires and silent where it does not, is used.
Position is read from the member's own contributions in the debate section the division belongs to, by a three-step cascade: an explicit move of the question ("I move amendment No. 5", true by construction); declarative stance phrases ordered so negations are tested first, because "I cannot support" and "I do not oppose" both defeat a naive keyword match; and, where neither fires, a zero-shot entailment model judging the contribution against the question put. Tone uses a separate model and is reported separately. Agreement against hand-labelled cases, with bootstrap intervals, is on the evidence page; no score here should be read without it.